Last Week’s New Yorker, week of July 6 & 13

Hello, dear readers! As I may have mentioned, I’m part of this year’s NYC Teaching Fellows, an intensive five-week training program (four weeks to go!) through which I’m getting my teacher certification. I knew it would be a lot, and boy, it is! I kept this newsletter going throughout my extremely stressful job teaching 9th grade, something I’m really proud of… but that also stretched me very thin. I think the best way to find my work-hobby-life balance is phasing out the extremely time-intensive hobby for just a moment. So I’m taking a pause from the whole shebang just for the length of the summer program, then seeing what life looks like on the other side and reassessing. Consider this my little Appalachian Trail. However, I fully intend to continue reading the magazine and sending rankings out once a week with extremely brief commentary which does not aim for witty brevity but merely states my top-of-the-head feelings, as demonstrated below.¹ If all goes well, the newsletter will resume in full with, roughly, the August 10th issue.

Must-Reads:

“The Great Infestation” (A Reporter at Large) - Absolute classic Burkhard Bilger. Such, such fun! I hope my lack of blurb doesn’t discourage you from reading it.

“Californian Sublime” (Musical Events) - In case you hadn’t heard, this is Alex Ross’s last piece as the classical music critic for the magazine. The end of an era, and a goddamn good one. And even without that knowledge, this is a dynamite little blurb, a fitting sendoff for the best all-around regular music critic working in pop or classical. Ross will continue writing features. Do yourself a favor and watch the video of the violin piece he talks about at the end here, 42:00 in, it’s insaneo and the violinist pulls faces I have never seen the like of.

Window-Shop:

“Die Another Day” (Books) - Dhruv Khullar always smuggles in a little bit of normie-centrist-scienceism, but the balance here is okay, and I’ve been using a less-thoroughly-confirmed version of the central thread here (basically, that the so-called oldest people in the world are, statistically, always just doing welfare fraud) as a party anecdote for a very long time, so I’m happy Harvard has caught up.

“Elevated Looks” (The Art World) - Really good!! Can Rachel Syme be a regular reviewer?

“No Return” (Letter from Austria) - Mixed feelings about this William Finnegan longread, which takes the shape of an instant true-crime classic and basically justifies itself with its detail density. Still, I dunno if it’s totally fair to apply this very punitive, American view of claiming Plamberger got away scot free because, even though he was judged guilty, his sentence was light. Some of the ending cynicism feels oddly measured for a situation where all the facts can’t be known.

🗣️ “Eyes Closed” (Ways of Seeing) - By Thessaly La Force, who’s new to this role. Fun! I saw and liked the show.

“Bodies of Work” (Portfolio) - Jennifer Wilson’s blurb is witty as always, but the conflation of OnlyFans with all internet sex work is a bit odd – a lot of creators fled that platform ages ago, and they don’t need the publicity; it feels like conflating Facebook with social media in, like, 2019. The photos, by Katy Grannan, are really lovely and refreshingly distinct from one another.

🗣️ “Mark Singer” (Postscript) - By Ian Frazier. Heartfelt.

“Billionaire’s Vagina Club” (Brave New World Dept.) - These evil weirdos have a point about the trappings of the one identity for which they face hardship! Must be a coincidence. (This is a good example of a blurb I would make way snappier, even at two-sentence length, if I weren’t deliberately rushing through these.)

🗣️ “Geo-Fi” (Semiquincentennial Dept.) - I listened to and didn’t love the album, but dude’s a chill enough hang.

Skip Without Guilt:

“Robot Revolution” (Annals of Technology) - You don’t need to spend this long telling us the ways in which this is all a big scam, Stephen Witt; we get it. Reaction YouTuber Danny Gonzalez scooping this magazine by seven months is embarrassing for them.

“In-N-Out” (On and Off the Menu) - Hannah Goldfield reaches a critical mass of poop jokes, which, like poop, is something you don’t want to have a critical mass of. (That joke doesn’t make sense! Sorry! Moving on!)

“Regression to the Mien” (A Critic at Large) - For some reason the magazine decided it was Jia Tolentino Instagram Face Article Commemoration Week, commissioning both a very funny but not especially pertinent followup from Tolentino herself and also this hard-to-follow, thesis-free ramble by Cal Revely-Calder that feels a bit like the speech your professor would give the day after having everyone read the Tolentino piece for homework.

The Weekend In Brief:

Even getting one Thingy is good. They’re like restaurant stars or whatever.

“Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare” (Weekend Essay) is said Tolentino piece – so, see above. One Thingy.

“Gatekeeping” is Bryan Washington’s latest, a long, semi-anecdotal story about an airport worker. It features so many of his usual themes and preoccupations one could play B.W. Bingo, but I’m a big fan of his style – especially his dialogue, which is superbly mundane-poetic – and this worked for me, if not reaching the heights of the all-timer from last year. Two Thingys.

Well, that’s it. In some ways I wish I weren’t doing this temporary slimming, only because I think part of what’s “funny” or perhaps “profound” about this newsletter as a project is its unchanging, repetitive… periodical nature. Have I spoiled the joke forever? Tune in and find out!

would it be funny or insufferable if instead of posting a different song down here every week I just posted Au Pays du Cocaine down here every week? I guess we’ll find out.